


What Was, What Could Be and What Should Have Never Been

by hithelleth



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-23
Updated: 2014-07-23
Packaged: 2018-02-10 03:06:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2008584
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hithelleth/pseuds/hithelleth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Grant Ward was not a part of the team, not really. But they didn’t know that and sometimes even he forgot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Was, What Could Be and What Should Have Never Been

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lisaroquin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lisaroquin/gifts).
  * Translation into Magyar available: [A kőbe vésett múlt, egy elvesztegetett jövő és egy félresiklott élet](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4423229) by [a walking Babel fish (angelette)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/angelette/pseuds/a%20walking%20Babel%20fish)



_It wasn’t the best of the beginnings. Nothing unexpected of such a diverse team: the mix of personalities and experience was bound to bring about some miscommunication and confusion. And after the close call in Peru, things escalated._

_“Are you mental? I did explain in great detail exactly what I meant, using the queen's bloody English!” Leo fumed._

_“I use normal English — words like ‘duck’ and ‘run’ and ‘might blow us to pieces’.”_

_“Oh. Oh! Well, congratulations, Agent Ward. You managed to string three words together in a sentence.” Leo didn’t skimp on sarcasm._

_The bickering went on until Coulson cut it short. Not for long, though._

_“… I'm a specialist,” Ward was saying, “Today, I could have eliminated the enemy threat myself if I was working alone, but I had non-combat-ready agents —”_

_“Whoa, whoa. Wait. You work alone?” Bloody field gorillas. Always forgetting…_

_“So typical. Who do you think designs your equipment?” Jemma jumped in, taking the words right out of Leo’s mouth._

_“Or the polymers for your weaponry. Yeah.” Leo pitched in. “People like us do it.”_

_Jemma added the final touch: “Try going into the field with just your bare bum.”_

_It was downright insulting. Why, of course, Mr. Specialist could have saved the day all by himself, had he been working alone, without non-combat agents hindering his superior ass._

_So, obviously, they had things to work out._

_Good luck with that._

***

They do work it out, eventually.

It isn’t easy.

Grant Ward isn’t a team player. (He is not really _on_ the team, anyway.)

All his training has been focused to make him the sole solution to a problem, not just a part of it. This cooperation thing takes some getting used to, and maneuvering through it is tricky.

Somehow, the team becomes a team not only in name; they are good together, efficient. They work well, they have fun.

It is _pleasant._

Sometimes Grant almost forgets he is not supposed to do pleasant, that sharing victories and laughing over a game of poker is just biding his time, until his real orders come.

Sometimes this novelty, this charade, however alien it is to him, feels familiar, like something he belongs to.

The thought is disturbing and sobers him up. There is no such thing as common ground with the team. He is on his own; they are strangers, only thrown together for a time.

The trouble is: he is proved wrong time and again and more than a few times all by himself.

***

_“You’re an 0-8-4.”_

_Ward frowned. “What?”_

_“An object of unknown origin…”_

_“Yeah, I know what an 0-8-4 is.”_

_“… and just like an 0-8-4, you’re a sort of a mystery as far as I’m concerned,” Leo ignored the interjection, fiddling with the gadget in his hands, fixing and re-fixing a micro-camera inside it. “You do the shooting and the punching, I do analyzing, building these… You operate in ways that are completely strange to —”_

_A low chuckle from Ward put an abrupt stop to Leo’s stream of words. He squinted at the older agent, who was leaning against the counter, surprisingly not laughing at him. On the contrary, Ward regarded him quite solemnly._

_“Right back at you.”_

_“Huh?”_

_“You’re an 0-8-4 to me, too. I just make a good use of what you come up with in here. I don’t speak your science lingo…” Ward shook his head, trailing off._

_“Really? I thought you speak 6 languages. Science isn’t one of them?” Leo joked._

_Ward scoffed, though there was a spark of amusement in his expression. “I guess we have more things in common than we thought,” he concluded._

_“I guess we do,” Leo agreed. He offered the set-up device to Ward. “Here. Position it like this. Off. On.” He showed and pointed as he spoke before handing it over._

_“Thanks.” Ward turned to leave._

_“Um,” Fitz cleared his throat, “What I wanted to say was: I’m sorry that back in Peru I didn’t communicate it well enough how dangerous the 0-8-4 was. It didn’t occur to me to put it more simply. Not that you are simple,” he hurried to amend, “no offense...” Leo gave up with a sigh before he would utter more stupid things._

_Ward smirked. “None taken.” He hesitated a moment, then left._

***

0-8-4s, truly.

Firstly, they come from different places.

He imagines Fitz grew up in a white-picket-fence-and-a-dog type of a family, a golden boy who had never done anything wrong, a little scientist on his way to become a genius, doted on and encouraged, sent to good schools.

Grant was a juvenile pyromaniac, discarded by his own family (which wasn’t such a loss — not his loveless parents, anyway, and not Maynard, but…), well on the way into the never-ending cycle of crime and incarceration, had Garret not pulled him out.

Then there are their fields of expertise.

He has to give FitzSimmons some credit; if nothing else, their toys come in handy in combat. But in the end it is still brutal force that saves the day: a man not only capable but willing to get his hands dirty while Fitz and Simmons are safely tucked away in their fancy lab. In all fairness, the lab monkeys could probably do more damage with a computer in an hour than he in a year, but on the day-to-day basis operations are either saved or doomed by a common well-trained soldier.

Fitz and Simmons solve riddles. He is an action sort of guy.

They couldn’t be more different. Strangers. Zero-eight-fours from distant universes.

***

_Leo returned the nod of recognition as Ward passed by._

_“I had Ward's back the whole time. Yeah. Pretty much saved him from a gang of Russian mobsters and kicked a few guys' heads in,” he told Jemma. Not that he was bragging. He’d better let it go. “But enough mission talk already.”_

_It had been exhilarating._

_Dangerous, but he had felt_ alive _._

_And he had certainly developed an appreciation for some good old-fashioned ass-kicking._

_He was proud of how he had done out there. Ward certainly seemed impressed. They made a good team.  Brawn and brain, so to speak; one couldn’t go without the other, could it?_

_The mission left something behind, a connection. A friendship, Leo would call it. Though, then there was also that_ other _thing._

***

The mission in South Ossetia changes things.

“Truth is, I was in good hands,” Ward tells Skye.

He means it. Not only could Fitz hold his own, but he actually saved their lives.

Working together was not at all bothersome as he had thought beforehand. It was… easy, refreshing. They had a blast, Fitz says later. Grant wouldn’t disagree.

_“… you're not the only one that Coulson talked to, okay? He told me to take care of you, too. And that's exactly what I'm gonna do.”_

The statement came as a small shock.

Grant Ward doesn’t rely on other people. Each man for himself — that is all he knows, that is all he has been taught. He doesn’t need anyone to take care of him. No one _has_ ever cared for him. Not even Garret, perhaps he of all people the least. Grant owes him everything, but he is not stupid: above all, he is a tool, only as good for Garret as he is useful — anything more would be a weakness. And those are to be eliminated.

It takes him a while to realize that knowing someone (perhaps several someones) cares about him feels good.

Good. Unsettling.

***

_Leo refused to indulge in the glimpses of fantasies randomly flashing through his head._

_Ward pining him against the wall, their lips meeting for a bruising kiss, his hand slipping into Leo’s trousers and bringing him off with only a few urgent strokes, his eyes trained on Fitz the whole time._

_Or, Ward bending him over a convenient hard surface, making him whimper and beg while he takes him apart, leaving him feeling raw and sated for days after, and still hungry for more._

_It was a psychological reaction to a shared intense experience. That was all it was._

***

Grant catches himself wondering what would Fitz’s lean body feel like against his: whether the hard angles of their bodies touching, moving together, would somehow feel gentler, softer than the volatile encounters with May; whether it would be different than just blowing off steam.

The proximity on the Ossetia mission must have messed with his mind.

Garret’s stepping up his game plan is a wake-up call.

It’s a relief.

He has nearly let himself go weak, lost his objective, himself.

Or would he actually find himself if there was more time? It doesn’t matter. He only has to obey Garret, follow his orders. It’s as simple as that.

Yet, not simple at all, not anymore.

***

_‘WARD IS HYDRA’_

_It had to be something else, a code, or they were just messing with their heads. That was what Leo first thought when he saw the writing on the wall._

_Ward was their friend; he cared about them. The possibility it had all been feigned was absurd._

_Even in the face of piling up evidence — the first crucial one, Simmons’ finding that Ward must have killed Koenig, was like a punch in the gut, a burning pain that knocked the air out of him — Leo couldn’t simply ‘accept the truth’, as Jemma put it. He needed to understand why, how. People were not born evil; they had a choice. Ward was a good person; he could still choose to do the right thing._

_However, Ward chose wrong._

_Leo couldn’t wrap his head around it._

_Though, the med pod was supposed to float. There was a glimmer of hope in that, hope that Ward_ was _his friend. They were friends. A part of him kept holding on to that belief, clinging to it even when water filled his lungs and drowned all thoughts._

***

_“I know that you care about us, Ward!”_

_“You're right. I do. It's a weakness.”_

Rule number one: don’t get attached, attachment is a weakness.

A solution to this functioning error offers itself at once, conditioned by Garret so forcefully it might have just as well been etched into Ward’s mind. He puts on armor, locks himself inside it. But his armor is cracked, no longer pain- and guilt-proof, and there is nowhere to hide from the truth.

So, maybe he cared. Maybe he _cares_.

Caring is a weakness.

His weakness, his _could-be_ is now battered and broken — _“Fitz may never be the same again,” Coulson said_ — and it’s all his fault, because he wasn’t strong enough.

The torture, indeed, is internal.

**Author's Note:**

> What did you think? Good? Bad? 
> 
> I hope I managed to keep them in character, though my memory is terrible and this was written before I got time to rewatch some things, and I tried to work in your prompt for slow-built appreciation of each other’s respective fields of competence, but I’ll let you be the judge of how well I did this. ~~Basically, this is my first fic for this fandom & pairing and I tried my best but I’m a little nervous.~~ I really hope you like it.
> 
> Comments are always welcome.


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